I found myself recently offering advice to someone regarding their V4 morphs, and it occurred to me the given my limited V3 experience I’m far from qualified to offer it.

 

Last night, I set out to change this – and here are the results. This is my attempt at a unique, cute, realistically proportioned character.

 

I’d love to hear any opinions or suggestions on how to improve this. Of course this kind of thing is incredibly individual, but if there are any seemingly obvious problems or oversights please let me know.

 

I don’t have any particular projects in mind for this, so once it’s complete I’m more than happy to share (free of course).

 

Custom character on the left, default V4 on the right.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

And here's a close up of the face.

Standard on the left, and a slight Fae variation on the right.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Great job!  Kind of reminds me of Frazetta.

I have no idea who that is Patorak, but thank you :).

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

You're welcome.  How's it going on fitting clothes to her?  

Frank Frazetta.  He did all the book covers for the Conan the Barbarian series.

I actually like that quite a lot, although the outer high parts of the breast have that troublesome straight cone-like edge that is hard to fix with V4's builtin morphs.  If you're interested you might want to take a whack at bringing that in some way or another (this is one of the reasons I bought Zbrush).  You did better than I have so far at smoothing out that damn sharp hip bone too.  Very cool non-V4 V4 morph.

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The brilliant fantasy art of Frank Frazetta, very often imitated, never matched:
http://www.frazettaartgallery.com/ff/index.html

You can call the guy a hack, but he turned hack work into his own art style.  So many people rip him off these days :)

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PS: the long toes really show in that, although maybe you prefer it.

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Ah yes. Clothing. Hadn't gotten that far yet :).

The default V4 swimsuit won't be too hard, and dynamics are always pretty flexible. Anything beyond that will depend greatly on whether the clothing includes all of V4s morphs, as that's all I used for this (no custom morphs or magnets).

For those with Wardrobe wizard it won't be a problem, obviously.

I'll have to check out Frazetta's gallery when I get home. It's blocked by my work server for some reason.

That troublesome V4 breast line is emphasized by the pose, but I'd love to be able to fix it. I'm still struggling horribly with ZBrush for the moment though pjz99.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Nope, I don't prefer long toes. Nothing wrong with those that do though :).

I hadn't actually noticed! Thank you! This is the kind of feedback I was hoping for.

Now, off to fix those toes.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

I figured out a pretty repeatable import/export scheme for Zbrush 3 with some help from Nruddock and others, take a look at the thread in the Zbrush forum.  It's not very easy to transfer to other people, but for personal use it seems to work very well.

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Thanks for the info!

My Zbrush struggles go far beyond import/export though :).

It's the same feeling of almost total confusion I had when I first opened Poser.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

It's wonderful! Her tummy and bottom and thighs are wonderfully done!

Some things that I contemplate when looking at her, since you asked for critique

Sure, some heavier people have relatively undefined ankles, but there's also good many of them whom have pretty well developed ankless and calves, I guess it's often the case of walking around with extra weights, and pumping those muscles. Especially those people whom are rather active.  Oh,and there's seldom any gap between inner thighs.

Her arms could use a little more muscle definition, or maybe some shortening. Seems like they're a bit too long for her height.

Her nose... it's a typical clawshrimp nose? Love it, but if the nose bridge is little narrower, she's look a lot more feminine. Wide nose bridge on a euro-caucasian face often speaks to people of birth defects...  if you know what I mean, I'm having a tough time describing it.  She doesn't look like it yet, but it's close...  It fits her better on the fae variation.

Now, those are just some tidbits for thought,.. your or other people impressions may be different, so take what makes you think, and chuck the rest. It's still amazing though... I'm having a tough time finding enough complimentary words without repeating myself!!!!!!

Hi, my namez: "NO, Bad Kitteh, NO!"  Whaz yurs?
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Thank you Connie. I'm always amazed I get any compliments at all. I'm just a hack that tinkers until I find something I like :).

I've got a HUGE soft spot for wide nose bridges. It's something I rarely see in Poser figures, particularly women, which almost uniformly have perfect, petite noses. But as you said, there's a fine line between cute and weird. I think I'll tone it down for the standard morph, but keep it as it is for the Fae.

Improvements I'll be making when I get home:

• Shorten the toes.
• Shrink the feet a little.
• Lose some weight from the lower legs.
• Defined the ankles.
• Reduce upper/inner thigh gap.
• Adjust the nose bridge.

Improvements I really really want to make!:

• Shorten arms.

I really wanted to do this, but couldn't for the life of me get V4 to scale without some pretty horrible distortion. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I think once they're shorter there won't be a need to beef them up.

Thanks again guys.

Keep 'em coming!

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Oh, if you aren't looking for "very stylized", you may want to bring the eyes a bit closer together.  "Typically", heads are 5 eyes wide, with an eye widthe between the nose; some variation of course, but that's a bit much.

Be warned that scaling the limbs is really troublesome.  Maybe you'll have better luck than some of my efforts.

Upper/Inner thigh gap has a hard limit - the joint parameter angle.  But you can adjust that when needed.

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Great job. Native morphs only or a trip thru the modeling app?

I am shooting for a balance between realistic and stylised proportions. I will toy with whether I can reduce the distance between her eyes while still maintaining her uniqueness.

I find it puzzling that Daz thought to add a Leg Length morph dial but not an Arm Length one??? Maybe I'm expecting too much...I guess I've been spoiled by Apollo. I tried Carodan's old Apollo trick of universally scaling everything down, then scaling up everything but the arms, but this just lead to even more mesh kinks.

Anybody know wheter there anything in the 4.1 release that would help? I haven't bothered installing it yet myself.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Sorry fls, missed your post.

This was achieved using native morphs only.

When I finish this I'd like to group the morphs under a single name so people can then use regular morphs on top. Plus, it looks nice and neat. Would I need to load this as a morph target OBJ? If so, how would I go about it?

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Try scaling the arms in only one axis, the long one (probably Y) by a moderate amount, rather than the whole arm.  There are morphforms for arm thickness and forearm thickness that you can adjust the other two dimensions with.

V4.1 has a LOT of different face morphs that are worthwhile all by themselves, and I believe a couple of extra morphforms for shoulder thickness and one or two other things.

Bodypart scale changes are hard to make portable imo - my advice is morph as you like, and then note the scale changes and make a separate pose file by hand to set those parts.  Typical INJ pose creator probably won't build it into the pose file (could be mistaken).

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Thank you for the suggestion.

I did try scaling only the Y axis, on each individual section of the arm, but they all still lead to some nasty kinks.

It might also have been exagerated by the pose.

Plus, I did this at around 2am this morning. Lateral thinking isn't my strong point when I'm tired.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

The long axis for the arms is X. Everything else is Y. This is true of virtually all figures, with the exception of some parts of male figures having Z as the long axis. Wink wink, nudge nudge ;p

Ha ha!

I adjusted whichever axis makes the arm longer or shorter :).

I never remember which is which!

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

*It might also have been exagerated by the pose.
*Ummm... sowwy, but it doesn't seem like it is... When you compare her to V4 on the right, the arm lengths are about the same, where the legs were a fair amoutn shorter :(   Maybe I'm being too picky :(

You tickled when someone likes your stuff? You kidding me? I dragged my honey to the monitor today (he's been hearing about the vicotrian shoe and other rendo stuf whether he likes it or not LOL) showed him your gallery, and then excitedly proceeded to tell him... this guy is so freakin' good, I'm amazed he bothers talking to me at all!

Um.... Same goes for several other people here!
[I have a feeling I've just put my foot in my mouth here - big time... Kitty runs and hides under the bed]

Hi, my namez: "NO, Bad Kitteh, NO!"  Whaz yurs?
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You're right of course Connie, but that's not what I meant :).

What I meant was when I tried to shorten the arms initially, the mesh kinks that resulted may have been exagerated by the pose. That's why I returned them to the default length.

I always assume everybody else is following the same train of thought as I am! My problem...I'll deal with it ;).

Tickled? I'm downright flabbergasted! I've only been Poser-ing for a relativley short time, and have been using Photoshop for even less time. Just look at the first few images in my gallery! So embarassing. I'm not an artist, but I agree with you that there are some truly gifted genuine artists here at R'osity.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

My oh my you have been busy lately Claw.  She looks simply magical!!  Can't wait to see your continued work on her.    If you can it would be smart to ask around from folks like Lyrra to see if they can help you devise a universal magnet fit for getting clothing to fit this new form. 

---Wolff On The Prowl---

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Wolff, good to see you here, and thank you for the compliment.

It’s amazing how much you can get done when you only average four hours sleep a night!

This morph was just a little something I knocked together last night (took around an hour). I’ve still got my graphic novel project ticking along, as well as teaching myself ZBrush 3 and Adobe After Effects…among other things. Oh, and my submission for the Apollo Vin Diesel morph - almost finished that one too.

The universal magnet fit sounds like a great idea. Once the character is finished I’ll see if there’s enough interest to warrant the effort.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Cool.  I think having a nicely shaped "womanly" female shape in the runtime is a nice idea!! but better if she has clothing to wear.  So hopefully Lyrra will be up to helping you out or another magnet master....

---Wolff On The Prowl---

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I was just reading through old threads trying to familiarise myself with Lyrra’s work (great stuff too) as we haven’t yet crossed paths.

 

Lyrra posted only a couple days ago that work would only be done on fit morphs for custom morphed figures, not dialled figures, unless they were very unique.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

I like her! She has a uniqueness that I haven't seen in a character morph.

I dont know how to say it, and I hope it won't disuade you from contiinuing to work on and develop this young lady, so I'm going to just say it....

When I first looked at the image I was reminded of Down Syndrome.  The figure in the top image on the left (my left) has the typical body proportions (longer torso, shorter thicker legs)  and the face has many distinct characteristics of a person with Down's Syndrome (smaller eyes  which are wider apart and a broad nose).

http://www.crowstarver.com/edufiles/rose.jpg

http://timesonline.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/snow_010.jpg

 

That being said, I hope you continue to work on this wonderful morph :)

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi

Don’t worry, you haven’t dissuaded me. I really love honest feedback, and completely appreciate what you’re saying.

 

The more I look at this morph, the more I see there are shades of Downs. Hopefully with the changes I’m making it’ll away from that.

 

Not that I wouldn’t love to see an accurate Downs morph for V4, just that I don’t particularly see this character filling that need, and don’t think I’m personally up to the task.

 

I suppose my lack of direction when starting this morph has become my biggest hindrance. I wanted a unique, cute, realistic, stylised, tom-boy, fairy. No wonder the figure’s so muddled! I haven’t given up on ‘her’ yet though. I for one have seen enough cookie-cutter V4s in the gallery to last a life time! :).

 

Incidentally, Carodan (the morph master) was working on a Downs morph for Apollo which was coming along very nicely.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

I would echo most of the above suggestions ... butt I sure would like to see her from the rear! Me loves some voluptuous womaness...

Gallery

Well, I really like the morph as is - well done !!! :)

@ ClawShrimp --

Excellent!  I hope that you are either planning on selling the morph, or else giving it away!

Great work.

:thumbupboth:

Something To Do At 3:00AM 

Wohaa, I'm glad you've made a not so average character.I was really getting tired of all those mainstream "playboy" -like characters, with superlong legs and pumped-up boobs. It really feels like a refreshment. great work!!

Regards,

Bopper.

-How can you improve things when you don't make mistakes?

Based on everyone’s great feedback I’ve made quite a few refinements to the morph.

 

Slimmed and toned the lower legs.

Reduced the size of the feet slightly.

Shortened the arms.

Fattened the forearms.

Brought the eyes close together.

Lessened the width of the nose bridge.

Reduced hip width.

Fattened the face a little.

Evened out the overall proportions.

 

And overall tweaked everything to get it flowing together a little smoother.

 

Linkdink - There’s a butt shot there for you :).

Xenophonz – Once it’s complete it’ll be freely available to anyone who wants it.

 

What do you all think? Am I getting closer?

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

And here's her face.

Sorry about the wonky eye :).

I turned the wrong dial by accident and didn't notice until after I had hit render.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

That's very cool :)  How did you reduce the arm length?  I'm thinking the same trick will work for lengthening limbs as well?

How did you get the knee to be thick?

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I think she is an absolutely stunning character.  Great job!

I am:  aka Velocity3d 

To be honest, I turned so many dials last night it's hard to tell exactly which did what :).

The arm shortening took a bit of fiddling, and it was a combination of scaling across more than one axis, as well as across several body parts. For instance, byscaling the chest width down I was able to loose some kinks in the forearm...weird, I know.

I haven't tried lengthening the arms yet, but would love to have a go at a female counterpart to my Ogre. His kids had to come from somewhere!

The knees were again a combination of things. Decreasing the thigh and calf width, but increasing the thigh tone I think. Plus some scaling to correct the kinks.

The one thing I couldn't get to work was shortening the toes. Scaling those just made a mess of the feet. So I just made the feet smaller overall.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Use pjz toes shorter morph

I am:  aka Velocity3d 

Duh!!! I feel so stupid!

That thing has been staring me in the face and I didn't even see it!

I'll do that tonight, along with whatever other improvements people can suggest.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

She's lookng marvelous!
One thing I'm looking at is her boobs... considering the rest of her voluptiousness, her boobs could be a bit fuller. Typically the first place a girl gains weight (peeking in a mirror after the three days of eating weekend) is in the boobs.
Love what you did with her nose and nose bridge, looks very believable, and cute. I think narrowing it down a tad allowed for her eyes to get a tad bigger... little bigger eyes (but not too big) tend to add to the cuteness factor :)
Wonderful work!!!!

Hi, my namez: "NO, Bad Kitteh, NO!"  Whaz yurs?
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Thanks Connie. I can always count on you for honest feedback.

I did toy with increasing her bust size, but each time I did it detracted from the overall figure.

I agree that many women tend to gain weight on their 'boobs' first, but not all women. This poor girl is a touch more endomorph (pear shaped) than your average girl. :)

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

That's pretty cool, like I said a very good non-V4 V4 character.  Good info about scaling a mix of bodyparts to fix that rough join.  I had a lot of trouble scaling fingers longer for one of my characters, but hadn't really thought to try scaling the HAND back down, might be worth another look.

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Being in the beauty business I can tell you I have clients coming to me in all shapes and sizes and a few plus sized women as well.  Quite a few clients "suffer" with the pear shape and dress properly to overcome it.  Smaller breasts and larger hips and thighs, nothing wrong with it if that's how your built and your not into spending half your life in a gym and starving to keep it otherwise. 

I think your doing a great job at creating a very realistic looking woman Claw.  Not sure about the bridge of the nose being in that far though.  Perhaps nudge it out a tiny bit more??  From a profile view it looks more like a Asian nose and I don't think this gal is Asian!!   Hot blooded and Western European noses tend to have a bit more shape to them from a profile!  We're not taking huge beaks here but there is a bit more to them in the profile.  Pretty eyes offsets the nose so it's not looked upon as too much or out of whack with the rest of the face.  I like the width of the nose, it's quite nice but yea, the depth is just too far in to be believable to me for what I see from the front. 

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“Suffer” was probably the wrong word J. I for one think a strong back/hip/thigh contour can be infinitely more attractive than the standard super-model physique.

 

Good point Wolff. I’ll definitely bring that bridge up. I’m going to keep the bridge deep for the Fae variant though, which incidentally will have a completely different body.

 

That render was in fact the first time I had really studied the morph from side on, and hence hadn’t really noticed the nose depth. I normally morph from a ¾ view - not ideal I realise.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Great work, ClawShrimp.

Something To Do At 3:00AM 

Finally done!

I've uploaded a final render to my gallery.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1453374

Will up a full body scene once I think of something worthwhile! :)

Thank you all for your honesty. It's been a really refreshing experience!

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Top notch.  A rare variation away from the typical gallery character here, in the same category that I try for myself, but very original.  Really nice job.

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PS:  three cheers for NoseTwist .2 or so, unless I miss my guess.

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really lovely render! :)

(errr, do you think that you might release the character at some point? (I'd certainly be interested in buying if you put her up for sale!)

pjz99...you are too good! - It was .25 :).

oddboots - the morph will be available for free once I figure out how to save it as a single morph (morph target?). I like the idea of having just one dial for the character, much like the majority of merchant characters.

Any tips would be appreciated. My efforts thus far have been fruitless.

Oh, and gotta finish up the body morph for the Fae varient too!

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

That's really generous of you - thanks!!! :)

I'm afraid I don't have the first idea of how you would go about making it a single morph, though...

You can simply save a pose file and include morph channels, and the resulting pose file will contain all the morph dial changes you have set.  It'll be about 650k though and will contain a lot of channels that are zeroed, which is probably not that desirable, although it works.  Since you are heavily experienced with Apollo, I expect that is probably the way you are used to distributing character morphs for him?

This won't get the scale changes though, I suspect you will end up having to just write that by hand.  Actor (bodypart) scale information isn't written out with pose file information as far as I can see.  I bet there is some documentation out there that details the exact syntax you'd need, if it's possible to do (reasonably sure).  Kuroyome's site is probably a good place to look for info on something like this.

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Many of the merchant character morphs are built with some tool like INJection Pose Builder (DAZ) or the tool I used, Binary Morph Editor (for sale here at Rendo).  I recommend Binary Morph Editor here, simply because I got it to work, and the entire manual is available via PDF before you buy it, downloadable from the product page.

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Also to add to pjz99's suggestions.  Save the face as a seperate face and body as separate files so folks can use what they want of the set.  I did that when I created Bruno for Vittorio 4.  He's got 2 MOR files in the pack.  One seperate file for the face and the full body morph.  In all honesty I couldn't figure out how to save the face morph info with the body info so I just kept it separate!! LOL 

---Wolff On The Prowl---

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do u have a preset lighting scheme for ur renders? can i have it pleaze

I'll look into those morph dial builders. Thanks pjz99.

@ Melisand - I don't use any one light set in particular. It's simply trial and error, with thankfully some luck accidents along the way.

My two most recent images, which are very similar in a number of ways, use a custom HDRI with AO (hence the muddy shadows) and a specular light for eyes etc. That's it! Just two lights! (Well, not REAL HDRI, but the Poser 7 approximation).

If you have Poser 7 I'd suggest using the included HDRI sets. They're realy quite good, particularly 'Pond'.

I also do ALLOT of colour and contrast correction in Photoshop. The raw renders can be horribly washed out.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

The morph turned out very, very nice :)  She no longer looks like she has Down's Syndrome.

I would still like it if there were such a character though.

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi

Very unique ClawShrimp, Love it!

Just uploaded a portrait of my Fae variant, in a similar vain to my last image:[

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1453985](http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1453985)

The Fae will be know as Rhyme, the other as Reason. Thanks go to BtB for the 'Rhyme' suggestion.

Still trying to figure out a nice way of presenting these in a full body image. Will up when something 'works'.

Thanks!

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

ooh nice work :)

I'm so tired of skinny women (er ..sorry all you skinny gals out there)  As a student of classical art I tend to prefer a more rounded figure

So feel free to ask me to make a fit set for her grins

Lyrra

Hi Clawshrimp, to be honest I don't have time just at this momment to read this thread carefully but I wanted to pipe in anyhow! Looks terrific. Really this is a very lovely character and a great work. Connie has very good comments. The problem with Daz fat heavy morphs is at the wrists and especially the ankles. My only worry here is the gap at the groin but it is no big deal and also a Poser jointing issue. The face is remarkable, I like it. Thanks for showing.

Lyrra, I'd absolutely LOVE for you to make a fit for her!!! But first, I have to figure out how to save this character for easy distribution.

I've tried a number of different avenues, but nothing I do seems to keep everything intact. Any suggestions?

While I say the version I've pictured in this thread is final, I'd also like to drop it into ZBrush and fix a couple of minor issues; and possibly use the P7 morph brush to smooth out a couple of trouble spots.

What I'd like to be able to do is save this character so it can be applied from a pose file, with it's own single character dial (as I've seen countless times in vendor characters). Anyone know how I can do this? If need be I'm more than happy to buy a 3rd party app.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

You're probably running into the same pain that I have - it's easy enough to customize a V4 character with some scaling and whatnot, but making it portable is quite difficult, and I have huge problems trying to move morph targets back and forth.  Maybe you'll have better luck than I have, I don't have a lot of motivation to figure out how to do it the "right way".

I am pretty sure that having it all go on one character dial is going to require some hand editing of the pose file.  The general category of tech you want to look into is "Extended Remote Control" or ERC.  Kuroyume again is probably a good source of info on this, let me look up his site addresss...

http://www.kuroyumes-developmentzone.com/index.html

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or maybe it's not... hmm google google

http://www.nerd3d.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=8 a meaty, meaty tutorial on JCM that relates to ERC (or EMC in that doc)

http://www.rbtwhiz.com/rbtwhiz_ERC.html Rob Whisenant's version

another version
https://artzone.daz3d.com/wiki/doku.php/pub/technotes/content/erc

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Thank you for this pjz99. In a way I'm glad I'm not alone with this problem. Makes me feel less stupid!

I really thought it would be as simple as making whatever changes to the figure I saw fit, exporting the resulting 'character' as an OBJ, then re-importing as a Morph Target to the default V4...How silly of me :).

Looks like I've got a fair bit of reading to do over the weekend!

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Yeah, the problem is that some things are included in the OBJ export (raw point deltas) and some things are not (scale changes, apparently).  It's very troublesome when developing a V4 character because there's no easy way to tell whether a given dial is purely a morph (and can thus be exported to OBJ with no trouble) or if it contains some scale change or something that will manifest some problems when joints are bent.

At least it's confirmed that you CAN put scaling into a slider mixed with other things:
**http://www.rbtwhiz.com/rbtwhiz_ERC.html
EMC evolves into ERC.***Beginning a month or so later, having the information fairly fresh in my mind, I couldn't "leave well enough, alone". The newness and shock of it began to wear thin and it occurred to me that what we discovered could quite possibly affect more than just morphs. So, I began testing; any and every channel I could find. I was ecstatic with what I found. Nulls (valueParm), morphs (targetGeom), rotation, translation, scaling, deformers, lights, cameras... they all worked! *
It occurs to me that this is very likely how V4's "MorphForms" work under the hood. 

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Does every merchant/vendor go through the same crap?

If so, they deserve every penny they get!

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Oh hell.  Suddenly a lot of things make sense, why I've had such problems with import/export(and why you're having similar problems).  Export -> Wavefront OBJ -> "As Morph Target (no world translations)" ...  so of course, it's doing exactly what I tell it to.  I have been thinking about this for some time.  I think the way around this is to back out any scale/rotation/translation changes before export (so the figure is properly, completely zeroed), and then move them back in when done.  I suspect one would just want to avoid scaling etc. like the plague if one wants to do any export/import with external apps.

A lot of merchants, when you actually apply their character INJ pose - they just spin the dials in the great majority of cases that I've seen.  This is why almost all V4 characters look pretty much the same.

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I'm at work right now and left my laptop rendering on my desk at home, so I can't test this right now.

But if this works...I owe you a bottle of wine!

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Would have been nice of DAZ to publish which dials are ERC, so they can be avoided when necessary.

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Then what would we do with all this spare time?

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

well technically if you use any DAZ morphs when creating a morph the resulting morph cannot legally be distributed without encoding it against the original file

What you want to do is save the figure in your library as a cr2 (you must have "exterior morph targets' and compression turned off in Poser)

Then use MATPoseEdit and open the cr2.  If you set the options correctly, you can then save a Pose, without material information, but with Morph and Scaling channels. And MPE is free. The program page has tutorials on using it including to make MOR (dial and trans setting) poses

  http://koti.mbnet.fi/%7Eilaripih/MPEHome/ 

with v4, unless you have your own morph obj, INJ files are unneccasary

And if you guys had any idea how much work goes on 'behind the scenes' to make clothing look and move correctly .....  sighs  Frankly hardcoding pose files is easy peasy in comparison.

Lyrra

"Technically" or not, all the V4 characters I own were distributed this way, with just the DAZ built-in dials spun to create the body shape.  The idea isn't to distribute the deltas themselves, just the dial settings.

That is good info, that MAT Pose Edit will save scale channel data, I was about to ask about that in the Poser Tech forum.  I'm reading in Rob Whisenant's documents that there is some risk that MPE will have trouble with very large files?  V4 CR2 files are typically 50MB or so.

http://www.rbtwhiz.com/rbtwhiz_rScript.html

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A really interesting thread here, though the character ClawShimp is making looks terribly wonderfull!!

It's exactly what i'm looking for, a way to save morphs to be released. I had no luck with INJection Pose Builder. I mean, i succeeded to have INJ/REM files, but no way to know which settings are for... :(
I think IPB has been made in prior for 3rd unimesh character. Cause V4 loads with all her dials, the settings MUST be different then.

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Yeah I had a similar difficulty with DAZ IPB.  I went with Binary Morph Editor available here at Rendo because I could get it to work for the freebies I offer, but I am pretty sure it ignores scaling, which doesn't help too much here (might be good for you though Vince).  The complete manual is available via PDF before you buy.

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I'm in information overload right now!!!

Lyrra, that's some really great advice. Even more reading for this weekend!

Once I finally get this thing sorted out and the morph out there for all to enjoy, it'll be back to Apollo for me! :)

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

I know exactly how you feel :/

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LOL

---Wolff On The Prowl---

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I had a run at what you suggested pjz99:

• Zeroed ALL Scale / Rotation / Transformation dials
  * Export > Wavefront OBJ > As Morph Target (no world translations)
• Load Morph Target to default V4

...Poser 6 hangs, Poser 7 closes down completley.

Am I missing something? It's probably me :).

I'll give Lyrra's suggestion a try tonight.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

If you are working with V4.1, you probably have some bugged morph data on the head that can make Poser crash or otherwise act fruity in a variety of ways:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2996094&ebot_calc_page#message_2996094

Can you give more detail on what steps you're taking? 

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Well, firstly it was V4. I haven't bothered installing 4.1.

The steps I took were simply what I stated. From your reaction it sounds like I may have skipped a step of ten :).

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Great job! Kinda looks like my boss

Should I take that as a compliment equan? :)

I ask because my boss is a 67 year old Nun!

My job is somewhat...complicated :P.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Are you exporting from Poser, back into Poser, or to some intermediate app?  What exactly are you exporting?  How are you exporting it, with what options?  Your goal is to get your character transportable to other people, right?  I don't think exporting to OBJ is going to help you at all, the reason I think you'd want to do that is just to get it into another app.

As I understand it - and be aware my understanding may be quite poor :) - one way to get this to work is:

• Save a pose file that includes morph channels - you'd think body transformations would get scale changes too, but it doesn't.  This will also leave all the zeroed channels in the poze file, which you may not care about.  I wouldn't, particularly, but if you want to you can trim them out with some editor, possibly MAT Pose Edit as suggested.  Since you're going to zip the file anyway it will compress down quite small.
• Write a second pose file by hand that is modeled after the attached example, with a block for each bodypart that requires scaling and a sub-block for each dial that needs to be set.  It took me a few minutes to figure out the syntax but this works.

When you distribute, just have the user load both pose files as desired.  If you are seriously dead set on learning ERC to do this, more power to you, you can bundle all this together into one pose file I suppose and include the ERC channel configuration stuff (if it was me I'd not bother).

*note the attached "jpg" is the pose file, just rename it and remove the .jpg and place it wherever you like in runtimelibrariespose

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Thank you again! I think you know this already, but you rock pjz99! :)

I'm going to try what you've advised, and also give Lyrra's approach a try too.

I've already spent far more time on this than I wanted to, but I'll give this one last shot.

Ultimately, while I'd like to share this character, it's hardly worth my sanity :).

If my next effort goes pear-shaped, I might just have to relegate this permenantly to the 'too hard' basket.

I'm a glorified dial spinner after all. Allot of this is way above my head...and I was content in my ignorance until now!

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Well, it's good to understand how it all works even if you don't have aspirations to be a content vendor (I don't).  Good luck, I hope this works out for you.

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At the very least I have a new found respect for the vendors that do it the right way (i.e. not just dial spinning...like me :P).

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Just between you, me and the fence post, most vendors only spin dials too, at least from the selection of character morphs I've bought.  Blackhearted/Rio's GND2 and Aery_Soul's characters are the notable exceptions I can think of.

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Too bad either of them or Sarsa doesn't stop in here to lend a hand and some advice on how best to export and load and test this wonderous morph of your Claw!!  Not discrediting any others advice but if it's still not working out then there must be a step in there missing or something that needs looking at.  Maybe PM them??

---Wolff On The Prowl---

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To clarify for your pjz99 (sorry it took so long, I missed that part of your comment). The reason I did the whole OBJ export/import is simply to see if it would work.
Ideally I would like to fix a few things (in one of the plethora of 3D apps I own) before importing back into Poser. I didn’t want to waste time making those changes until I was completely sure I could actually import it and load it as a morph target.

Of course, you know the result (or lack thereof).

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Going into other apps:  I understand now why Richardson suggests exporting to OBJ, and stripping out grouping with UVMapper.  This will still have problems when using ERC dials that change scale of bodyparts though.  

I've actually learned a lot of useful stuff trying to help you out with this, and I'm sure you've picked up some tricks as well, so don't feel too bad.  Time to go figure out how to do displacement maps in Zbrush, and if you're interested I'll be writing that up in the Zbrush forum when I figure it out - given some of your characters' wrinkly look you may get some real use out of that.

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I am absolutely interested!

There are only so many ways you can chop up Carodan's great Apollo displacement map :).

That was the main reason for my ZBrush 3 upgade.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

I have some bad news.

 

I’m afraid to say that Rhyme and Reason (the aforementioned V4 morphs) are no more.

 

I had my third consecutive and most monumental system failure last night, and had to bid farewell to my aging HDD (and it's content).

 

Thankfully I back up all of my bought content to CD, and have all of my images and custom Apollo characters saved to my thumb-drive (love ADS!).

 

This has been a long time coming, so serves me right for not taking appropriate precautions.

 

It’s been a great learning experience though! Thanks again to everyone for their help.

 

I still have a bunch of test renders that I’ve saved, so I’ll hopefully have a tribute image to put up tomorrow.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Sorry to hear ClawShrimp .. It sucks when hard drives die.

That's terrible.  I was soo looking forward to her.  Hopefully you will have luck like mine and your next effort will far surpass this one = D

I am:  aka Velocity3d 

Hey Claw.  So very sorry to hear that.  Can you say SEAGATE??  5 year warrenty and so far fast as lightning and EASY to set up!! 

Good luck to you and best wishes! 

Richard ;-)~

---Wolff On The Prowl---

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Oh man, that really sucks!   I hope you recover from it soon!
When my hard drive crashed few years ago, I was feeling for a while like something died!
I lost several years worth of renderings :(, and that aws all before I put any in a gallery here.

I hope you didn't lose too much stuff!

[Kitty ponders a 'condolences for the loss of your hard drive' hallmark card]

Hi, my namez: "NO, Bad Kitteh, NO!"  Whaz yurs?
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Oh, poo  - just found this thread and was getting excited about her. :( . 

Sorry that this happened to you.  It seems it's always when you haven't backed up something you really wanted up that HD failures happen.  I also hope you didn't lose too much other stuff....

Maybe you'll decide to re-create her, and find it's easier this time, and even better! 

Cheers,
Alisa

RETIRED HiveWire 3D QAV Director

That's a shame, sorry that happened to you.  :/

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Thanks to everyone. It's all good though. I'm not upset or annoyed...just can't wait to get back on the horse. :)

As I posted earlier, I've still got every item I've ever bought backed up on CD, and all of my personal Apollo stuff and renders backed up on thumdrive.

The laptop was still under warrenty, so the HDD is being replaced free of charge. I'll pick up an external HDD this weekend for backup purposes too. A lesson learned :).

I'll have to go hunting for all those great freebies I've amassed, particularly textures. Plus this'll give me the opportunity to get my Runtimes in perfect order from day one.

I don't know if I'll remake this exact character, but once I'm up and running again (should be tomorrow!) I'll make a start on a new morph in a similar vain. I find it easier working organically, rather than with a specific purpose.

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

Quote - Great job!  Kind of reminds me of Frazetta.

 

Frank did love putting a little meat on his girls didn't he? Usually in the right places.

Comitted to excellence through art.

Quote - I'll pick up an external HDD this weekend for backup purposes too. A lesson learned :).

Very smart move there Claw!!!   I too learned the hard way.  I have my stuff backed up TWICE!! Ya never know!!  Call me paranoid but 3D is an expensive hobbey and I don't want to take any chances at all!!

---Wolff On The Prowl---

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If you like working organically, something for you to try:  Select the Head, and use the morph tool on the head, not in Create mode, but just in Combine mode.  Lock everything but the Shaping branch like shown, and just drag parts of the face around.  It's pretty cool for experimenting and whatnot, although be aware it's easy to pull the face out into a werewolf snout if you're not looking at the side view often enough.

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I've been having allot of fun with the morph tool, and this sounds like a great way to approach it. Thanks pjz99!

I tend to work with my window split if I'm working on a face - One 3/4 and one profile. Exagurated proportions are mostly avoided this way.

Are these types of morphs easy to share with others? How would you go about saving them?

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

They'd end up easily transportable just via a pose file for the Head, very compressible (plain text).  I think the common nickname for that approach is a "MOR" file, as opposed to INJ/REM poses where you're actually injecting point deltas.

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I was toying with this approach for an expression pack for my 'Deaky' Apollo character.

I used the usual dials to get a basic expression, then the Morphing Tool to refine the shapes and smooth any problem areas. The only problem was I had to save the result as a Pose, not an Expression.

The Morphing Tool is by far the most useful addition to Poser 7 (except undo, of course).

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

It's pretty fun, yeah :)
Great for hair too, the morphs in the hair the better.

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What a great idea!

It hadn't even occured to me to use it on hair!!!

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!

woops, should have been "the MORE morphs the better".  Just be careful to lock out any fitting/sizing/fitting morphs, e.g. anything "Aiko" or the like.

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I've put my final farewell image up in the gallery. Don't expect too much...it is a cleaned up test render after all :P.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1467790

My 'new' unique V4 is coming along nicely. Saving and backing-up frequently! :).

If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards...checkmate!